Update – It did not get easier


When I first started 20.109, I had barely read any scientific journals, let alone written a research article. Fast forward a few months, with the module 1 paper done, I thought I knew a little bit about scientific writing and that this research article would be somewhat easier. Surprise, surprise, I was wrong. Well, kind of. While I found the data harder to interpret in the module 2 article (chemotherapy making cells more viable???), I think that the overall formatting and writing was much easier after module 1.

I think the best resource in preparing this assignment was actually the journal club. During journal club, I read my article many times, analyzing its strengths and weaknesses, which really helped me get a feel for scientific writing and how to make it effective. Multiple times as I was writing my mod 2 article I referred back to my journal club article. It was also helpful that my journal club article was tangentially related to mod 2, so the overall formatting ended up being fairly similar.

I also thought that the Comm Lab presentations on scientific writing were very helpful, and I liked how they were split into lots of smaller topics, such as one presentation on abstracts and titles. I think these presentations made it easier to write each individual section as its own story.

Additionally, as with everything in this class, assignments become much easier if you put more effort into homework assignments, as the instructor feedback is super useful.

Anyways, we did it! On to making some batteries now…
-Abby McGee

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